20 Jul

SEO Step By Step Guide– 148. Semantics – The Next Generation Search

As we can expect, the search industry will not be the same and the search engine algorithms will not be the same for ever. We need to expect a lot of changes in the search industry. One of the main directions of change is to be expected in terms of how search engines treat content in our web pages. Currently, they treat each word individually and they do not try to derive any meaning out of the words present in a web page. This is mainly because deriving meaning and interpreting the text is a higher-level activity of human brain, which cannot be matched even dismally by the search engines. However, it does not mean that there will be no improvement in this direction. Already we are talking for semantic search engines.

When the search engines achieve semantic capabilities, our optimization efforts will have to be modified drastically. Keyword density of a document will not be sufficient to get good rankings; rather keyword density will not be a major factor in achieving good search engine ranking. Content development or writing web copies will become rather more complicated. Now it is very easy and straightforward to write web copies that are search engine friendly. If the searching engines achieve semantic capabilities, then we would require language experts to help us develop content for our web pages. As the competition level increases, we may have to use complex language semantics to gain online visibility. Content development in such a scenario will become a highly challenging and interesting task. However, many SEO writers who manage with limited writing skills will have to pack their bags looking for alternative professions unless they equip themselves with the required writing skills.

What is the use of moving to semantic search? Semantic search simply put, will retrieve results that are more accurate. We will be able to get more targeted results. Search engines will fetch pages based on the context and not just by the presence of the keywords. Our search experience will be enhanced for a better experience. As of now for every search, we are getting a number of irrelevant results. This is because search engines do not understand our search queries completely. Once we move to semantic search engines, search engines will be able to fetch better results. This will reduce the overall time we will spend online in searching for the information we need. This in turn will pose a serious challenge to the SEO professionals. We can foresee that even link building will also be affected because search engines will be able to discern the quality of a link based on the relevance of the websites from which it is coming.